Grajewo (pronounced [ɡraˈjɛvɔ]; Yiddish: גראיעווע, romanized: Grayavah) is a town in north-eastern Poland with 21,499 inhabitants (2016).

[3] During the January Uprising, on March 12, 1864, a clash between Polish insurgents and Russian troops took place near the town, won by Poles.

As a result of the discriminatory Russian regulations (Pale of Settlement), at times Jews formed a majority of the town population.

The Soviets deported many Polish inhabitants, especially the intelligentsia, military, policemen, foresters, officials, wealthier merchants, farmers and craftsmen and their families, to the Far North (Arctic Circle), Siberia and Kazakhstan.

[7] On 29 June 1941, following Sunday mass, local Polish anti-Semites carried out a pogrom killing 10 Jews and injuring dozens of others.

However the next day on 30 June the Jews of the town were assembled at the market square by the German Gestapo and the Polish perpetrators of the pogrom were asked to identify communists who were then brutally beaten.

[7][8] On 2 November 1942 the SS surrounded the ghetto, and drove out the Jewish inhabitants to a transit camp in the village of Bogusze.

[9] In autumn of 1941, the occupiers established another transit camp for people deported from various regions to forced labour in Germany.

[9] On July 15, 1943, in the Kosówka forest, the German gendarmerie in cooperation with the Gestapo murdered about 150 Poles, most of them inhabitants of Grajewo.

[2] On January 20, 1945, the Germans committed another mass murder in the Kosówka forest, killing 300 Polish inhabitants of the town.

According to data from 1945, 5,366 inhabitants of the Grajewo county lost their life during the war, only 163 in military operations, 5,009 as a result of the crimes of the occupiers.

[citation needed] It was restored to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s.

On May 8, 1945, the anti-communist Home Army seized the buildings of the communist Public Security in Grajewo and freed over 100 prisoners.

[2] A few years later, in 2006, Grajewo was visited by Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, whose father was born in the town.